Electronic commerce is an increasingly popular way of selling goods and services, referred to herein collectively and interchangeably as “items,” to consumers. Activities of electronic commerce typically, but not exclusively, include browsing for items to purchase; comparing various aspects such as price, color, warranties, and the like of items for purchase; inspecting product details of an item; purchasing one or more items; and the like. The popularity of electronic commerce (sometimes referred to as “e-commerce”) has prompted more and more vendors to make their goods and services available over electronic networks, such as the Internet, and computer users have correspondingly embraced electronic commerce as a legitimate shopping environment.
Both vendors and computer users benefit from electronic commerce in a variety of ways. For example, users do not have to travel to a number of vendor locales to purchase a given item. Rather, a user can now purchase a desired item from the convenience of his or her home. Further, users can quickly compare a wide variety of similar items and prices from a number of vendors in order to make an informed choice in their purchases rather than spending an entire afternoon in comparison shopping. Vendors are benefited in that they can reach a much larger group of customers than those who reside in their geographic vicinity.
One feature of electronic commerce with which customers are familiar and upon which vendors have increasingly come to rely is a recommendations feature, i.e., when a customer selects an item for purchase, or places an item on a wish or gift list, the hosting electronic commerce site provides one or more recommendations of alternative and/or complimentary items that the customer may also wish to purchase. These recommendations may be based upon any number of criteria including the customer's prior purchases and purchase tendencies, recommendations from the product vendor, what other customers have purchased, top sellers or recent releases, product categories, genres, types, consumer feedback, and the like. Indeed, substantial research and development effort has been made into providing highly relevant alternative and/or complimentary recommendations to a customer in order to increase the likelihood that the customer will purchase one or more of the recommended items.
As an example of an electronic commerce site generating recommendations, FIG. 1A is a pictorial diagram of an illustrative browser view 100 showing the display results of adding an item 104 to a wish list. More particularly, the display results 102 include a display of the item 104 and a set of recommended items 108, including recommended item 110. As can be seen, in this illustrative browser view 100, each recommended item may also be added to the wish list via a corresponding control, such as control 112, which will then display the newly added item with another set of recommended items. Also shown is a link 106 to view the contents of the wish list.
Since the consumer added item 104 to her wish list, and assuming that the consumer now wants to view the contents of her wish list, the consumer clicks on the link 106, resulting in the electronic commerce site outputting a view of the updated wish list. To that end, FIG. 1B is a pictorial diagram of an illustrative browser view 100 showing the updated wish list 120. As can be seen, the item 104 is now on the wish list, as well as other wish list items, such as item 122. However, the recommended items 108 previously displayed are not displayed/included as they are not part of the wish list. Moreover, since the item 104 is now on the wish list, those recommendations cannot be readily re-viewed. Indeed, typically the only way to see the recommended items again is to delete the item 104 from the wish list, revisit that item on the electronic commerce site, and add it again to the wish list, which will result in the intermediate step of displaying the item 104 with recommended items 108 as shown in FIG. 1A. Clearly, while revisiting a set of recommended items is not impossible, it is, at best, very inconvenient.